WAR
PARTY DUMPS BUSH?Newsweek's
anti-Saudi conspiracy theory is a shot across the bow

It
had to happen sooner or later, and I don't want to sound too
full of myself, but I did predict it: I mean the attempt
to tie the Saudis, Al Qaeda, and the Bush administration into
one gigantic conspiracy and cover-up. Headlines are being
made by Newsweek, which ran
a story by Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas about how some
Saudi princess sent money to someone who knew somebody who
knew somebody else who funneled the funds to the 9/11 hijackers:
if you
go here you can see, in the form of a graph, how far removed
the alleged connection really is.

But
the tenuous nature of the alleged Saudi government link to
9/11 doesn't matter to Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who
are both on this non-story like dogs on a bone. Newsweek
hypes this tale as getting "inside the probe the Bush
administration doesn't want you to know about"! Thanksgiving
hasn't even gotten here and already we're in presidential
campaign mode.

Willya
give me a friggin' break?!

There
is absolutely nothing, zero, zilch, nada to this phony
story; it's politics, pure and simple. In
August I wrote about the infamous briefing given in the
Pentagon by one Laurent Murawiec, the ex-LaRouchie who railed
that we ought to threaten to bomb Riyadh and take over the
Kingdom. This column included a prediction that the Democrats
(led by Lieberman) would try to make the alleged Saudi government
connection to 9/11 a political issue:

"The
not-so-hidden subtext of all this is that the Democrats can
always bring up the Bush family's links to Saudi oil interests.
The killer is that the Democrats don't have to say a word ."

Why
bother, when the tag-team of Isikoff and Thomas, not to mention
platoons of neoconservatives, will do the job for you? Okay,
so it's a little off-putting to quote yourself  and so often!
 but bear with me for a moment:

"What
we're seeing, here, is a left-right squeeze play, with the
Bushies in the middle. It is, in reality, a form of political
blackmail, a warning shot fired over the bow  by the ostensibly
Republican neocons, and not the Democrats."

"Sens.
Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), who
together set up an independent commission that will investigate
the terror attacks, offered piercing criticism. Saudi leaders
'have to decide which side they're on,' Lieberman said on
CBS' 'Face the Nation.' 'For too many generations, they have
pacified and accommodated themselves to the most extreme,
fanatical, violent elements of Islam, and those elements have
now turned on us and the rest of the world.' Added McCain:
'The Saudi royal family has been engaged in a Faustian bargain
for years to keep themselves in power.'"

Lieberman
and McCain, both with unabashedly presidential ambitions,
are positioning themselves to attack the Bushies as "soft
on terrorism", i.e. soft on the Saudis and all those
other Ay-rabs, who, we all know, are all alike. So why are
the President's most fervent supporters over at National
Review also piling on?

The
view that the President has put off the invasion of Iraq,
perhaps indefinitely, now seems uncontroversial, even among
the most stubbornly apocalyptic. By going the UN route, Bush
has committed the United States to wait until the process
is clearly finished. Hans Blix, and not the President of the
United States, will effectively decide Iraq's fate. This not
only postpones the hawks' war plans, it also opens up the
possibility that the war may not come off at all. Although
we are told, on a daily basis, that Saddam the Monstrous will
never comply voluntarily with the disarmament process, he
may be more pragmatic than mad. And then what?

The
War Party is turning on the President with a vengeance: they
want to make the price of peace so high that war will be the
only politically viable alternative. The neocons thought they
had a bargain with the White House: unconditional support
for Dubya in return for a conflagration in the Middle East.
The alliance worked, for a time: until the neocons upped the
ante. For they are not just after Iraq, they want the whole
region  Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and beyond. As Monsieur
Murawiec put it in his
infamous rant in front of the Pentagon Advisory Board:

"Iraq
is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt
the prize."

The
White House wasn't going along with it, however. With the
triumph of the Powell forces and the UN-ization of what was
supposed to have been a short prelude to war, the neocons
are packing their bags and decamping. As I put it last summer:

"What
better way to blindside the Bushies than from within their
own camp  that is, from the neocons, who have no party loyalty
except to the War Party. If the Democrats will provide them
with a bigger, bloodier war to fight  one in which more Arabs
are likely to perish than in a piddling invasion of Iraq 
well, then, why not?"

In
stark contrast to Newsweek's sensation-mongering but
fact-deficient concoction, Time has come out with a
more sober assessment that makes the whole story of Saudi
complicity with the hijackers sound like Michael
Ruppert on acid, or perhaps Lyndon LaRouche in a particularly
expansive mood:

"Omar
Al Bayoumi, a Saudi who befriended two 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf
Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Midhar, when all three were living
in San Diego, funneled money or other support to them. The
investigation has concluded that Bayoumi, now in England,
had no idea the pair were Al Qaeda terrorists and aided them
only out of hospitality. But the FBI is still trying to sort
out his sources of funds, some of which, other officials now
tell Time, came through third parties with links to the Saudi
Royal family."

My
question is: why stop at the third or fourth remove? Why not
trace the financial trail all the way back to include
each and every individual who "indirectly" passed
money to the hijackers? That way we can be sure to cast suspicion
on everyone and anyone we care to name. The Isikoff-Thomas
theory is a real stretch. If the Saudis were going to be funding
terrorism, one might suppose they wouldn't be quite as blatant
as doing it through the bank account of the wife of the Saudi
ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

So
someone who knew someone who knew someone who had murky "links"
to the Saudi Royal family (which has 5,000-plus "princes"
alone) supposedly aided and abetted two of the hijackers.
But not even that is true, as Time points out:

"FBI
officials say the investigation, while not officially closed,
has concluded that Bayoumi was not a witting accomplice of
the hijackers in particular or al-Qaeda in general, and that
he did not, wittingly or even unwittingly, provide substantial
funds to them for any purpose, legitimate or nefarious."

Speaking
of impenetrable murk, these allegations bring to mind the
left-wing
conspiracy theory authored by Guillaume Dasquie and Jean-Charles
Brisard in The Forbidden Truth, originally published
in France last year and put out by The Nation in the
U.S. The basic theme of their book is that the Americans let
9/11 happen because of Bushian "softness" on the
Saudis, a tendency that can be traced to the influence of
Big Oil in American politics. According to Dasquie and Brisard,
this is what supposedly motivated the Bushies to enter into
secret negotiations with Bin Laden prior to September 11.
The popularity of the Brisard-Dasquie book in France is understandable,
as it blames us for 9/11  a popular theme in France,
these days. According to the authors, however, it isn't just
the U.S., but the whole Western world that has been duped
by those devils in Riyadh:

"The
U.S. is not the only one. The question is why developed countries
need to do commercial deals with Saudi Arabia and if those
commercial deals are why they must close their eyes about
the reality of the Saudi Arabian kingdom. Since the 18th
century, Saudi Arabia has been focused on conquering the world."

Here
is where the "it's all about oil" crowd and the
War Party meet and merge in a kind of "red-brown"
coalition.

But
it isn't all about oil, it's all about Israel  and
the internal political dynamics of the U.S. Ariel Sharon and
his American Likudniks thought the Israeli elections  now
set for January  would take place against the backdrop of a
U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the climactic victory of the IDF
over their Palestinian antagonists. A six-month delay wasn't
in the plan, never mind an indefinite postponement.

The
War Party has a bludgeon in the form of the Lieberman-McCain
9/11 "truth" commission, which will no doubt
take up the Saudi question in its extensive hearings. The
show should get really dramatic around the third act, with
election season well underway. The so-called "National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States"
(NatComTAUUS) was agreed to by the Bushies only after a lot
of pressure by the families of the 9/11 victims. NatComTAUUS
was engineered by Lieberman and McCain for precisely this
purpose: to hold it like a sword of Damocles over the head
of this administration. The Isikoff-Thomas confabulation was
the signal to cut the cord.

While
the conspiracy theories of the Forbidden Truth-Mike
Ruppert-"Bush
knew" Axis of Tinfoil are now enjoying a spate of
popularity in the U.S. Congress, you can bet that NatComTAUUS
won't give a toss about investigating other, far less problematic
angles on the events of 9/11. There is evidence that Israeli
intelligence was tracking the hijackers for many months prior
to the Day, reported by the BBC
and Die
Zeit, as well as Antiwar.com, but that isn't on their
agenda. Nor will they show the slightest interest in following
up this
story in Ha'aretz, about the terrorist connections
to certain accounts maintained in Israeli banks:

"The
Bank of Israel has obtained information that several accounts
held in Israeli banks may have been used to fund terrorist
activities. However, because of banking secrecy laws, the
central bank has not handed details over to the Justice Ministry.
The central bank claims that it is the ministry's obligation
to rectify the situation by legislating an amendment to the
Banking Secrecy Law, so that it will be able to hand over
the relevant information."

Shortly
after the terrorist attacks, the U.S. issued a financial watchlist
that was constantly updated and amended  indeed, these lists
have become a
story in themselves, as they found their way onto the
internet and are now being labeled "obsolete" and
said to have "mutated" (as the Wall Street Journal
put it in a headline). One such list was posted on the internet
by the Associazione Italiana
per il Factoring(Assifact), the association
of Italian industry and financial institutions, which was
instructed by the FBI to look out for any indication of activity
on the part of the individuals listed.

The
point is that the attempt to debunk the accuracy and reliability
of these widely circulated suspect lists is itself suspect,
especially in view of the Ha'aretz revelations, which
were based on same sort of lists. The U.S. authorities published
a list of "persons and organizations" suspected
of aiding terrorists, the Bank of Israel checked it against
information gleaned from Israeli bank records, and the test
came up positive, as Ha'aretz reports:

"After
completing screening of the accounts at the end of 2001, the
banks handed over their findings to [Supervisor of Banks,
Yitzhak] Tal. Several suspicious accounts and financial transactions
were found. The Bank of Israel has confirmed the existence
of accounts believed to have been connected to the financing
of terrorist operations but refused to state how many suspect
accounts had been uncovered and to which terrorist organizations
they were connected."

You
won't read about it in Newsweek.

Unless
Bush 43 gets his war plans in gear, and fast, he will find
himself caught in the middle of a very painful left-right
pincer movement. The Isikoff conspiracy theory is but the
opening shot of a war on the home front, a struggle started
by the militantly pro-Israel neocon Right, initially against
the reluctant warrior in the State Department and now expanded
into an all-out assault on the Boy Emperor in the Oval Office.
The message to Bush is this: Either it's war, or we show you
the door. It's that simple.

Will
Dubya go wobbly on going wobbly? In these days of our imperial
decadence, when deciphering the inner moods and facial tics
of the most powerful man on earth is the major pastime of
pundits, it's too easy to slip into the sort of "analysis"
one might find in, say, People magazine. But as I said
in my Monday
column, I'll bet the last straw was when the hawks sabotaged
Dubya's Autocue so
that he almost omitted a key and much-fought-over phrase from
his UN speech. Imagine his response to something so sneaky,
so underhanded, so disloyal, so un-Bushian. He must
have thrown a fit of truly presidential proportions!

If
the reflexively anti-Bush anti-warriors of the Left will pause,
for a moment, to reflect on the events of the past few months,
they will discover that their Manichean
view of Bush as the Platonic embodiment of Absolute Evil conflicts
with the known facts. The bandwagon is stalled on the road
to war, and the occupants have had to get out and push. Whether
they can get the engine re-started is an open question. What
all this reveals, however, is a new way of looking at what
the neocons call "World
War IV"  as a three-sided conflict, pitting
both the Islamists and Israel against the Americans, as well
as against each other.

An
invasion of the Middle East, starting but not ending with
Iraq, stands to benefit one and only one nation on earth,
and that is not the United States. Saddam's rusty old
Scuds couldn't get past the Azores, let alone make it all
the way to American shores: his "weapons of mass destruction,"
if they exist, are aimed at Israel, not the U.S. The regional
destabilization that would follow U.S. military action, besides
being a godsend to Osama bin Laden, would also give the Israelis
enough cover to carve a "Greater Israel" out of
Palestinian hides.

That
is why Israel's partisans in the U.S.  the Christian fundamentalists
who see apocalypse in the Middle East as a
good sign of the Second Coming, as well as the neocons  are
beating the war drums with renewed fury. Thank God George
W. Bush isn't dancing to their tune  yet.

What's
the meaning of all this, in terms of what the antiwar movement
should now do? As opposition to the advent of an American
Empire grows on the right and in the center, as well as the
left side of the political spectrum, antiwar sentiment is
surging. Our strategy must be to not only keep up the pressure
but increase it. Step on the gas! There's still time
to stop this war before it starts.